The church that hurt me had a perfect system for making sure I could never hold them accountable.
I spent 34 years inside a high-control religious group called the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite. When I finally started naming the harm publicly — the abuse covered internally, the shunning used as a weapon, the doctrine applied to everyone except the people enforcing it — the response followed a pattern so consistent it couldn't be accidental.
First they denied it happened or reframed it as something else.
Then they attacked my character. I was bitter. I had an independent spirit. I was offended and hadn't forgiven. My credibility became the subject instead of the claim I made.
Then — and this is the part that took me longest to name — they positioned themselves as the victims. My accountability was persecution. My questions were an attack on the true church. The institution that caused the harm was now the suffering party bearing its cross with patience.
I didn't have a word for this until recently.
The word is DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It was developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe how perpetrators and institutions respond when held accountable.
Once I learned it I couldn't unsee it. Every conversation I'd had with people still inside the church followed that exact sequence. Every time I raised something specific and documented, the conversation shifted from what I said to what was wrong with me for saying it.
The thing that makes institutional DARVO different from individual DARVO is the total control the institution has over your reality. They controlled my family relationships, my social world, my economic connections, my information environment. When an institution that controls all of those things deploys DARVO against you, you have almost nowhere to stand outside the system to evaluate what the system is doing to you.
I've been writing about this and other dynamics in high-control religion for a few months now. The response has been overwhelming — mostly from people saying they finally have a word for something they lived but couldn't name.
If any of this resonates I'd be glad to talk about it.